I had been checking his breathing for as long as I could remember.
Nobody asked me to. We shared a room, with a door through to my parents’ room so they would hear if anything went wrong in the night. I would wake, lie still, and watch for his chest to rise. If it didn’t rise fast enough to suit me, I would put my hand through the crib bars and feel for it myself.
I never once found him not breathing. I checked anyway. Every time.
The night it happened, I couldn’t fall asleep, which was unusual for me. So I was awake to hear him making a sound he didn’t usually make.
I waited what seemed to me like long enough. Then I got up, went through the open door, climbed into bed with my father, Erwin, and told him Rick was making noises and it was keeping me awake.
He was up immediately. Then he was at the basement door, calling down to my mother, Marjorie — four words. Rick is breathing different. I heard her come up the stairs at a run.
They carried him to the kitchen table, where the light was better. My father’s whole body had gone tense. My mother stood with her elbows braced on the table and her head in her hands.
I stood back, in the doorway, farthest away. I did not understand what I was seeing. I knew that it was bad.
I did not cry.
I was not brave and I was not clever. I reported it the way a five-year-old reports anything — as a complaint. He was making noises. It was keeping me awake.
But I had been on duty for two years by then. That is what hypervigilance looks like when it works, and here is the hard part: it did work. He was seizing. I had heard it.
And here is what I did not understand until I was grown.
My parents did not know what they were looking at either.
Rick had seized once before, in the hospital, on the first day of his life, and he had been on medication ever since. There had been no more. Neither of my parents had ever seen a seizure, he was in the nursery when it happened back then. Mom on the telephone in the corner of that kitchen that night was not managing an emergency — she was asking a doctor to tell her what was happening to her son–and what to do.
I could not have put that into words at five, but I understood it in my body anyway. That is where children understand things first. The adults did not know.
That is its own particular terror, and it is not the same as being frightened of the thing itself. A child can survive a frightening night. What rearranges her is finding out the people holding up the world are not sure either.
I never did cry. Not that night, not afterward.
I have gone looking for the feeling and there is nothing there — no fear I can put my hand on, no memory of wanting my mother. What I have instead is the map of that room. Who was nearest to him. Where the telephone was. How far away I was standing.
A body that goes that quiet is not handling things well. It is a body with nowhere to put what it has just taken in. From the outside, though, it looks like a calm, good little girl who was no trouble at all on a very hard night.
And a child who does not cry does not get asked.
Next time: what my family did with that night afterward, and the difference between being praised and being asked.
Lord, You know what we could not say and did not cry. Nothing we carried in silence was ever hidden from You. Give us words now, and someone safe to say them to. Amen.
Click here to see the first in this series.
